The writer of the “Voyage to Icaria” represents that he met in London Lord William Carisdall, who found in Icaria the one truly happy people he had discovered in his travels. Lord William kept a journal, in which he described this wonder-land, and this, we are told, has been edited and revised for the public with his consent. The object is to show that communism is practicable and is the solution of all social problems. It contains an account of an ideal society, but one which Cabet thought he was able to establish. He made the attempt, choosing Texas as a place in which his ideals were to be realized. He secured the grant of a large tract of land on the Red River, and sent out several advance-guards of Icarians in 1848, who were, however, attacked by the yellow fever, and had disbanded before he arrived in New Orleans with a later detachment. He learned on his arrival that the Mormons had abandoned their settlement in Nauvoo, Ill., and set out for that place with his followers. While the Icarians were in Nauvoo they numbered, all told, at one time fifteen hundred. As Nordhoff, in his “Communistic Societies in the United States,” justly remarks, Cabet might have done something with such a large band, if he had had anything of a business head. But he lacked firmness and perseverance. They met with some success in cultivating their land, established shops, pursued trades, and set up a printing-office; but instead of rejoicing in his prosperity, and laboring to increase it, Cabet was dreaming what he might do if he had half a million, as is evinced by a publication which appeared about that time, entitled “Wenn ich $500,000 hätte”—“If I only had $500,000.” He described the theatre and the fine houses he would build, the gas-works he would found, the parks he would lay out, and showed, among other things, how he could then introduce hot and cold water in the houses. To his description of this _brochure_ Nordhoff adds: “Alas for the dreams of a dreamer! I turned over the leaves of his pamphlet while wandering through the present Icaria, on one chilly Sunday in March, with a keen sense of pain at the contrast between the comfort and elegance he so glowingly described and the dreary poverty of the life which a few determined men and women have there chosen to follow, for the sake of principles which they hold both true and valuable.”[28]